“What I’m saying is that this man has forfeited his right to privacy. He has forfeited all of his rights. We need to know who these people were and why they attacked us. We need to know where they took the nuke. We need to know everything about them. And we do not have a lot of time. So I’m asking you, Endeavour, to look into this man’s mind and tell me what he knows.”
No, the Endeavour said.
“Then I’m going to torture him,” said Tobias, “and that’s going to be on you.”
No, it is not, the Endeavour said.
Tobias waited a moment longer, but the Endeavour didn’t seem to have anything else to say. He sighed. “Captain Sanders? Please go fetch what we’ll need.”
“Wait,” I said. “Endeavour? Seriously?”
It didn’t answer me.
“OK, everyone,” Tobias said. “The medical staff need every pair of hands they can get. If that turns your stomach, there’s body clean-up. Dismissed.”
Captain Sanders had already gone, and as the others filed out – Jonas, Simon, Professor Llewellyn – it left just me, Matt and Tobias. And the Endeavour, of course. And beaten and bloodied Damien Forster.
“You’re not seriously going to do this, are you?” I asked.
Tobias looked at me. “My hand’s been forced.”
I turned to Matt, but he was already leaving the room. I went after him. “You can’t possibly be OK with this?”
“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
“Complain a little louder!”
He shrugged uneasily. “The guy’s got it coming to him, Aaron.”
I watched him go down the corridor in disbelief. As I stood there, Captain Sanders passed me, carrying a box of gear – a Leatherman, a hammer, coils of wire, lighter fluid. Cruder even than what Draeger had used. They’d had it boxed up and ready to go. There was even a video camera in there.
Sanders saw the look on my face as he passed. “You think we want to do this?” he said. “Take it up with the fucking ship.”
I did, stumbling queasily back up the hall to my cabin, still hearing the distant screams of pain from the corridors around the medical bay. “Endeavour,” I said. “Please. You can’t seriously want this to happen.”
It’s not a matter of wanting, Aaron.
“This is on you!” I hissed. “I don’t care what you say, we’re torturing somebody because of you! They’re torturing somebody because of you! We have a perfectly good way of getting that information without hurting him, and you refuse to use it!”
It would not hurt him. It would hurt me.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said.
You do not understand, the Endeavour said angrily. Do you know what it means to seize control of another mind without permission? Do you have any idea of the stigma, the evil of it? No. You do not. Do not lecture me on morals when you have no idea what it is that you are proposing.
“What about what we did for Matt?” I said. “Was that ‘evil’?”
We had permission.
“What about the first night Matt and I came here, then?”
Different again. You are Telepaths. Damien Forster is a human.
“So fucking what!” I hissed. “What does it even matter? I’m pretty sure, if it came down to it – I mean, obviously he doesn’t want to talk at all – but if you asked him if he’d rather we eventually get info through torture or mind reading? I think he’d prefer the mind reading!”
What do I care what he prefers? the Endeavour said.
“What?”
I explained this to you before. It would not hurt him. It would hurt me. Torture, obviously, hurts him as well. But after what he did last night, I am not overly concerned with preventing him from being hurt.
I sat there in stunned silence for a moment. “Oh my God,” I said. “Am I the only person in this fucking valley with a conscience?”
I fail to see why you care so much about a cold-blooded murderer.
“What was that stuff you were saying about it not hurting them, but hurting us?” I said. “Fucking think about that for a while.” I stood up.
Aaron...
“Fuck off.”
A strange thing to tell someone to fuck off while you’re walking around inside them, but that’s my life now. I went back down to the room where they were holding Forster. His screams were already bouncing around off the corridors outside, mixing with the wails of the injured. As I entered, Tobias was yanking out another fingernail. The video camera was on a tripod. “Stop it!” I screamed.
“Aaron...” Tobias warned.
I cut him off. “Why are you even filming this, anyway?”
“So we can review everything he says,” Sanders said. He was standing by the wall with his arms folded, looking pale and unwell. Tobias had the stony gaze of somebody setting themselves down to an unpleasant task; behind him, Forster was huffing and puffing with pain. Witnessing Tobias torturing somebody felt deeply, shamefully wrong. Some small part of my respect for him had vanished forever.
“What do you want, Aaron?” Tobias asked.
I licked my lips nervously. “The Endeavour won’t do it. So let me.”
Tobias’ hard face turned into sheer astonishment. Then he flung the Leatherman down onto the floor in anger. “Jesus Christ, Aaron! You can do what the ship does? You could have mentioned that ten fucking minutes ago!”
“I don’t know that I can,” I said, calmly but loudly, over the end of his sentence. “But I can try. Isn’t that worth it?”
Tobias nodded. “Yes. Please. Go for it.”
I stood in front of Forster, feeling self-conscious in front of Tobias and Sanders – and, of course, the Endeavour. Forster himself was staring at me with a deep, silent anger. I vaguely knew his face, but he certainly hadn’t been one of Cole’s early men. How long had that asshole been trickling his operatives in, posing as regular survivors?
“This might take a bit of time,” I said, and sat down.
I took a deep breath, tried to calm my mind. I was operating on the same principles I’d used, when Matt and I had been trying to contact each other. Balance the mind. Project your thoughts. Engage with the other. Only then, there’d been Matt, a willing other with abilities to match my own. Now there was just Damien Forster, another regular human with no telepathic abilities whatsoever. It was like groping around in the darkness for a light switch and feeling nothing.
I sat there for twenty minutes. At one point Sanders said something I couldn’t hear, but Tobias shushed him. After some time, some intense concentration, I could feel Forster’s mind in front of me – but it was like an impregnable castle. No, that’s the wrong way to put it. I knew he didn’t have any mental defences, that if I could just find it, latch onto it, then it would be easy. But I couldn’t find it. Less like a castle, more like a Magic Eye picture. I knew it was there – I just couldn’t see it properly. I could sense Tobias and Sanders’ minds behind me, as well, and the great big cluster of them around the medical bay, and the others strung out across the valley like light globes, growing fainter the further away they were.
One of the minds in Jagungal stood out greater than any other – not the Endeavour’s, which is more like all-enveloping sunshine than a light globe. It was Matt. Not brighter or stronger than any of the other minds, but infinitely more aware, infinitely more connected. And he was growing closer.
I was vaguely aware, in physical space, of Matt sitting down beside me and focusing his energy alongside mine.
Together we hunted and sniffed and scratched our way around the edges of Forster’s mind, looking for the right way in, looking for the keyhole. The right way to see the Magic Eye. And eventually, we found it.
It washed over us in a wave, the linking of another mind to ours, the sheer crash of emotion and thoughts and feelings. Forster was projecting a tough guy rugby player exterior, but he was frightened. He knew the torture would only get worse and he thought we would probably execute him eventually. He was frightened
of what Matt and I were doing, frightened of the alien children poking around in his brain.
Beyond that, beyond base emotion, it was hard to say. It was like breaking into a library only to find that all the books were in a foreign language. (I’m sorry to labour the similes, but there really is no other way of explaining what telepathy feels like.) Matt was getting frustrated and impatient; mentally, I tried to make him chill out. We started combing through Forster’s memories, exploring in mental landscapes beyond our recognition, with no plan other than to see what we could see.
I could feel the Endeavour hovering outside, observing but not intervening.
We found flashes of visual memory from last night. The feeling of running a knife blade across a man’s throat, of firing a burst of bullets into an armed but unsuspecting civilian, of arriving at the Endeavour and following the sounds of voices only to see Jonas step out of the armoury wearing body armour and riot helmet and carrying an M60 machine gun. The fight that had followed, in the darkness of the ship’s corridors, had been vicious, close quarters combat. It had been one of the others who took Andy’s eye out while lunging at him with a knife, but Forster had seen it. Simon had tackled the assailant off Andy, and Forster had been about shoot Andy in cold blood before turning his attention to Simon, but Jonas had clocked him on the back of the head.
Matt found a way to follow the memories back further, as they became more indistinct and difficult to understand. Some were mixed up from what I realised must be years ago – watching children swimming in a community pool, scoring a try in a high school rugby match, sitting in an office filling out paperwork, standing at the edge of the Thames and watching Tower Bridge open up to let a ship through. Much of it was useless and jumbled. But we persevered, and after a long time managed to tease out the information we needed.
When we eventually rose out of his mind, exhausted and discouraged, the first thing that struck me was how thirsty I was. My back was stiff and sore. “How long...?” I asked.
“About six hours,” Tobias said. “I hope it was worth it.”
“Canberra,” Matt said. “They’re in Canberra.”
Sanders was gone, but Simon and Jonas had come in at some point, as had Professor Llewellyn. “Can I get some water?” I asked, and Simon gave me his canteen. “Who are they?” he asked.
“Government,” I said uneasily. “Ira Cole was with ASIS. So were a lot of the others. This guy was ONA. I’m not even sure what that is. There was some others as well.”
“DIO,” Matt said. “ASIO.”
“Intelligence agencies,” Tobias said. “Figures.”
“Captain,” I said. My stomach was churning. “They were sent here by the Prime Minister.”
Tobias scratched his beard. “Yeah. Well. About that. We got word on the radio about an hour ago. We can’t verify it – it came from a ship in the Bight, and they were just reporting something they heard from Kununurra – but word is there’s been a military coup on Christmas Island.”
“Fucking hell,” Matt said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Did you get any indication of why the Prime Minister might have sent them here?” Tobias asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s hard to tell. Maybe if the Endeavour did it we’d get a clearer picture.” I paused, wondering if the ship would interject, but it was silent. “I know they were all part of a government group in Canberra. One collated between different agencies, I guess. It stayed behind during the evac, and then some of its members were sent up here. To... keep an eye on us, maybe.”
“I don’t get it,” Matt said. “I thought you guys were sent here by the government?”
“We were,” Tobias said. “Maybe the government doesn’t trust us anymore. Or, at least, maybe the Prime Minister’s office doesn’t.”
“What’s this about a military coup, then?” I asked. I’d thought of it as a disaster – something like New England, hardliners seizing power. But if what had happened last night in Jagungal had been sanctioned by the PM...
“We don’t know,” Tobias said. “We’re hoping to get word soon. But you say they went back to Canberra? Do you know exactly where?”
I shook my head. “There was a building they were in,” Matt said. “I don’t know what it was, but I’d recognise it if I saw it again.”
Tobias rubbed his beard. “OK. I’m going to get on the blower to Wagga and see if we can scrape together some recon. You should get some rest. You look exhausted.”
I felt it, too. The sun had gone down while we were in Forster’s head, which had been very mentally straining, and I hadn’t exactly had a good night’s sleep the previous night. I left the cabin and made my way towards the bow, where my own cabin was. The ship had quietened down – there were no more screams of pain – but there was still the low buzz of conversation, the sense that there were a lot of people a stone’s throw down the corridors. I guess they were keeping as many of the wounded as close to the medical bay as they could, close the Endeavour’s wonderful healing properties.
I pulled my boots off and was ready to go to sleep, but something inside me felt horribly wrong and sad. Somehow today had been worse than last night – seeing Andy’s horrific injury, walking in on Tobias torturing a man for information, having the Endeavour tell me that it was quite fine with watching that man be tortured. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?” I said. “Going into his mind. The earth didn’t open up and swallow us.”
Your choices are your choices, the Endeavour said.
“So what would happen back on your home planet? Would I be in prison?”
Telepath society has no concept of prisons. You would most certainly be shunned.
“Shunned. OK. Would you be? For breaking into me and Matt’s minds, the night we met?”
Do you think that I’m infallible, Aaron? the Endeavour asked. I had been lying in these mountains for half a year. I knew that I was crippled and would never fly again. I knew that something had gone badly wrong with our seeding system, something that could have ramifications for the entire war. And I was lonely, Aaron. I was horribly lonely. Apart from dispatches to command I was completely by myself. I was starting to lose my mind. So, yes, perhaps I made some hasty decisions when the two of you finally arrived. But they are not mistakes I will make again.
“I don’t care that you broke into our heads,” I said. “OK? I don’t care! I’m fine with it, and so is Matt. Stop beating yourself up over it. We forgive you.”
You don’t understand.
It was making me angry, now. This was borderline religious stuff. “I cannot believe that you would stand by and watch a man be tortured rather than break your fucking moral code. And I don’t care what he did. That was even worse, actually. You wanted to see him suffer because of what he did, but you weren’t the one who had to do it. Tobias had to. You forced him to torture because you were more worried about your own fucking code.”
Had things gone the other way, Tobias would have been forcing me to torture because of his own “fucking code.”
“It wasn’t about that,” I said. “You basically admitted it. You wanted to watch him suffer.”
The Endeavour was quiet for a while. Then it said, I see everything in the valley, Aaron. My sensors have a radius of about two kilometres, depending on the topography. I may not be scanning everybody’s minds, like some wish me to do, but I see and hear everything, from every possible angle. Last night I saw forty-seven armed men mercilessly kill over one hundred. I saw every moment of violence, every gunshot, every stabbing, every cut throat. I saw children killed. I saw the survivors that I have gathered and protected here, the community that I have sheltered, running about in confusion, hailing people they thought were friends, asking them what was going on, and being murdered. I did my best, I tried to broadcast their names, I tried to tell people what was going on. There were too many of them. It was too chaotic. And the killing didn’t stop until they loaded the nuke into the Black Hawk and flew away. So, yes, I wanted to see this m
an hurt. I wanted to see him in pain. I wanted to see him suffer.
“You know what would really hurt him?” I said. “Finding out where he’s from. Going after his people. Getting the nuke back, and killing every motherfucking last one of them.”
Yes, the Endeavour said. And if torture had failed to provide us with the information to do that, then I would have gone into his mind.
“I can’t fucking believe you,” I said.
I stood up, gathered a few of my possessions, stuffed my sleeping bag into its case. I went down the corridors, past the sleeping injured, faces I knew and faces I didn’t. Outside it was bitterly cold, the stars peering through ragged clouds, the wind whispering the gum leaves. There were fewer campfires scattered about the place than I was used to seeing. The lights were still on up at the comms tent.
I hunted about until I found a tent that was no longer occupied – the owner dead, or perhaps gone off to Canberra with Ira Cole. I slept.
November 10
141 dead.
141. I can’t even begin to fathom that number. Men, women and children. It doesn’t even take into account the number of wounded. And wounded, that’s a bigger deal than people think. There’s an implicit assumption that wounds heal, that after a war or a terrorist attack, that only the number of dead matters. But Andy will be half-blind for the rest of his life. Danny Chee, one of the stockmen, had his arm amputated last night. Private Shaw, from Captain Sanders’ original platoon, is paralysed from the waist down – and we no longer live in a world of wheelchairs and disability ramps.
141. It rises, because some of the wounded keep dying.
47 is the number of men who turned out to be traitors to us. So all up, we’ve lost nearly a fifth of the people here at Jagungal, and that’s before you take the wounded into account.
I went up to the comms tent as soon as I woke up, and found Captain Tobias already there, struggling to make some sense of what was happening on Christmas Island. We still have no direct contact; still relying on third or fourth-hand reports, filtering back to us after pinging around other survivor strongholds and military bases across Australia. The only thing we know now that we didn’t already know last night is that only some of Parliament has been arrested, not all of it; which I took to mean only some of Parliament was in on the backstabbing. “The Governor-General,” I said. “Do you trust him?”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 159
